Justin Bieber - Baby ft. Ludacris

What this video is

Released in January 2010 as the lead single from Justin Bieber's debut album My World 2.0, 'Baby' arrived at a pivotal inflection point in pop music history: the transition from MTV/TRL-era gatekeeping to algorithmic, fan-driven YouTube virality. Bieber himself had been discovered via YouTube cover videos, making the platform's primacy in this video's rollout historically symmetrical. The Vevo-exclusive premiere…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of the teen pop revival of the early 2010s, 'Baby' demonstrated that YouTube could single-handedly launch a global pop superstar. It codified the cross-genre pop-rap collaboration format for the decade, and its mall-and-dance-floor visual vocabulary — grounded realism, fast…

The director

Ray Kay (born Reinert K. Olsen, July 10, 1978) is a Norwegian music video director and photographer based in Los Angeles. He has directed videos for artists including Cher, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Destiny's Child, Nelly Furtado, Enrique Iglesias,…